If I were made absolute ruler of everything I’d be sorely tempted to change the calendar so the new year starts on the winter solstice.
In honor of that temptation, the “home page” for my blog has been set to display the new 2012 blog by default, rather than Twenty Eleven. Except of course the new blog still doesn’t go live until January 1.
You can see the pattern here: keep escalating the conditions until one of them applies. Stopping on the third question implies something not exactly poverty, but well short of wealth. How much would I have to have backstopping my current income to keep worries at an absolute minimum? (I have just defined “wealth,” at least according to my lights.) It would have to be enough to restore my current, um, lifestyle with no discernible compromises — twice. (Because after the first restoration, I’d be on edge about every little thing.) I am loath to declare a dollar amount, if only because some of what is lost is time, and I can’t buy that for any number of dollars.
That said, the “current lifestyle” I would need to be able to restore, would not necessarily be the one I’m ... currently ... living. A house that holds heat in winter, and holds it out in summer, would be included—and there’s no telling what other luxuries I might require after something like that.
Then again, in my opinion the one thing surest to adhere to poverty is hating people who have things I don’t. So while I’m not rich, I’m also not poor and never have been—regardless of how broke I may have been from time to time.
My upbringing never made much of the Tenth Commandment as such, so I can’t say why I take it as seriously as I do.
I’ve just been in negotiations with someone who wanted to guest-post here for $30 per article (paid to me, not to the guest-poster), based on this site’s Page Rank of 3.
My Page Rank is higher than my daily traffic.
Since the articles would have been advertising for something or other, I was looking for a placement fee somewhat higher than $30. After all, anyone who thinks posting here would lead to sales, must be willing to believe other crazy things—like the Nigerian prince’s widow really does want to give them $25 million, for example. So I suppose it’s not surprising such people would use an obviously bogus metric like Page Rank to set rates.
I told them $30 didn’t come close to matching my rate schedule, and they didn’t ask what would, so I gather we’re at an impasse.
On December 7, 1941, my brother and I were as yet unborn, our parents hadn’t even met. My grandfathers were 45 and 47, respectively, each with a full crop of kids.
My father, however, was 17. It didn’t take him long to enlist and get into an officer-candidate program in Missoula, Montana, where my mother had grown up. By mid-1944 they were married in Victorville, while Dad was stationed at an Army Air Corps field there training for a combat flight assignment. D-Day had just happened but the end of the war even in Europe was still months away.
Unfortunately on a training flight Dad’s lifelong sinus troubles flared up at high altitude and he was dropped from bombardier training and offered a medical discharge. By war’s end he and Mom were back to civilian life.
The treachery attributed to the Japanese in their attack on Pearl Harbor drew a lot of boys into the recruiting offices, and while on Memorial Day we honor those who fell in uniform and on Veterans Day we honor those who went over to fight and came back afterward, quite a few were unable to go at all for one reason or another. The fact he wore his country’s uniform during wartime made Dad technically a veteran, but I can’t honestly say that, deep down, he thought of himself as deserving the honor.
Four weeks ago when we had our special election to choose a new state senator, the candidate I voted for didn’t make the runoff. So I wasn’t really sure how to vote in the runoff.
Until one candidate pointed out that the other had been a backer of Democrat gubernatorial nominee Mark Taylor back in 2006 against Republican incumbent Sonny Perdue. That made it a lot easier.
Apparently 60% of the voters in the district agreed. Mike Crane will be taking office in the General Assembly’s upper house shortly after the votes are officially certified.
In that brief time between waking up and getting up, I was on my back in bed when one of my wife’s cats hopped atop me and sat down in Egyptian-idol pose on a particular spot. So when my wife came back into the room I regaled her with a first draft of the following—which has not become any safer for work in the refining:
I do not see a way for the American people to change the direction of our politics or our economy by electing Republicans; the national party establishment is about to impose its will on the outcome of the nominating process before a single delegate is selected, and the two front-runners for the nomination at this time are both Beltway insiders with too much allegiance to The Way Things Are and not enough to how things are supposed to be.
It took 150 years but the GOP is finally following the trajectory of its predecessor, the Whig Party.
Here in Georgia the only way to be a Republican “in name” is to pay annual dues to the local party organization, which I haven’t done in years—so it’s not as if I have a membership card to burn in protest. Instead, I will say this:
The lesser of two intolerables is still intolerable. Losing more slowly is still losing. Bribing the tiger to eat you last still gets you eaten. And a vote for a big government Republican is still a vote for big government.
